Slashdot Mirror

All the BBC has to do is get the aliens that are watching them right now to turn on their tivos. Of course in another 50 years some might mistake this for a Dalek and come to earth with guns blazing! Or they might think that a Dalek compiler is where they are being manufactured and just blast Mountain View from outer space instead to save the poor enslaved earthlings from them.

My pattern includes 6 dots. From each element, I have at least 5 choices (hint, you don't have to use the nearest dot, you can go between them to skip a dot).

So there are at least 15625 6 element pattern combinations. Actually there are more because from some dots you have more than 5 choices (like the center dot where you have 8 choices). It turns out that this guy already did the math:

http://beust.com/weblog2/archives/000497.html
4 dots: 1624 solutions
5 dots: 7152 solutions
6 dots: 26016 solutions
7 dots: 72912 solutions
8 dots: 140704 solutions
9 dots: 140704 solutions
Total: 389112

Ironically, my Exchange admin requires a 4 digit password, and I chose 2 repeating digits for ease of typing (I could easily swipe my pattern without looking at the screen, I have a hard time doing that with digits), so my phone is less secure.

... that he was changing for the making of the tapes, as opposed to the software himself. I recall reading this on his site maybe ten years ago. This seemed weird to me, to charge for the menial task rather than the inspired one, and of course the costs of software distribution have now all but evaporated. Besides, what if the coder just can't be bothered with that stuff? It's not what they are valued for perhaps even as a genius (who doesn't eat much).

See: http://beust.com/stallman.html ("RMS was beginning to be successful with Emacs by that time, shipping more and more tapes. These tapes were sold $150 but, he insisted on that point, it was only the price of s&h. The software on it was both free from a pecuniary point of view, but more importantly, free of any intellectual rights. Fearing that these terms might change, RMS felt that he had to quit the MIT if he wanted to be sure that his subsequent works would belong to him completely. The Free Software Foundation was created and took over the distribution of tapes. RMS could now focus on his quest.")

So ... transient idealism?

It is interesting to now read the 1993 Wired view of Stallman's work: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/stallman.html

I respect the guy as much as anyone; amanzing contributions (I hadn't heard the EMACS angle, my ignorance). But his business model ... well, I'd still like to know more. The voluntary payment model seemed predominant now, and frankly that's a tax on the nice, people who feel a moral obligation and not necessarily the people profiting most ... and likely ignoring GNU obligations as well.

SUSE always made clear distinction between commercial/non-free software they include and core OS. Core OS always was and is GPL'ed Linux.

You have a short memory. YaST was non-free not so long ago. I think Novell made it free software after they bought SuSE. Back in the day, SuSE intentionally tried to package non-free software without warning the user: see this talk by RMS:

Stallman made an additional remark about Linux. Many different distributions are available, and one day, he tried to install one of them called "SUSE". He noticed that SUSE installed non-free (from a GPL point of view) software, but didn't tell you so. They were concealing the fact that non-GPL software was being installed on your computer. Asked about this, the SUSE people told RMS that it was intentional, that they didn't regard this detail as important, but that mentioning it might worry people and discourage them from using SUSE. Bottom line : RMS says "Don't Use SUSE" (for those interested, he recommends the Debian, which is one of the rare things him and I agree on :-)).

Since then, of course, they've seen the light and nowadays OpenSUSE is pretty good (I believe) about making a fully free distribution. There was some debacle with a non-free EULA on some beta releases, but I think that is resolved now.

I just (a few minutes ago) found this free PDF book about algorithms (written for the undergrad-level student). It's pretty good: http://beust.com/algorithms.pdf

A critique of R&R. It basically says that it will not "catch on" for the same reason that Lisp and Smalltalk never did: heavy dependence on esoteric ideas and meta programming:

http://www.beust.com/weblog/archives/000382.html

> This seems like another in a string of Escapist articles
> that tries too hard to think deep thoughts.

So true. As another fellow here said more eloquently a few days ago, I wish folks would just stick to writing about game experiences rather than trying to make games into a philosophy degree. For example, check out Cedric Otaku's blog entry on fighting hard instances in World of Warcraft. You can tell that (although he's no longer playing) he enjoyed the game and and he knows the issues involved in these monstrous battles. It's cool stuff, and a lot more fun to read than... well, other things.

Since no post is complete without a plug of some sort... here's my book!

Here are a couple of articles explaining why the distinction between tests and unit tests are becoming irrelevant:

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?threa d_id=36502
http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000319.html

Uniting testing I use junit for Java.

I prefer TestNG for unit testing Java things. It's much better than jUnit, it really is. You can define test dependencies and lots of other nifty things that jUnit doesn't allow you to do. If you are using jUnit, switch now.

Also IntelliJ's IDEA is a nice IDE, but not free.

Here.

Its difficult to find unbiased comparissons as I am sure you have seen from the flame wars that errupt every time the subject comes up. You can try this Web Services for a review of web services or this Smackdown for a synopsis of the recent petstore furore or check out GotDotNet for general stuff about .NET

If you agree with that statement, you're simply wrong. In markets with a single CPU architecture and operating system (VAX -> VMS, SPARC -> Solaris, x86 -> MS-DOS) people just trade executables, they don't for the most part bother with source. You only need source in markets with a variety of CPU architectures and/or operating systems. The ideas behind Open Source were conceived in an environment of many, often propietary operating systems and CPU architectures, pre-1989, pre MS-DOS dominance. The economies of scale that caused cheap Pee Cee hardware have little or nothing to do with Open Source.

Actually you're wrong. The issues that caused the rise of Free Software have nothing to do with having to recompile your application for different architectures and everything to do users being free to fix bugs in software they have been sold.

Here's a history lesson or two